Launch of fresh Tesla Model three impatiently awaited in Sonoma County
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | July 6, 2017
Santa Rosa businessman Wayne O’Connor possesses a one thousand nine hundred sixty six Corvette Stingray, an American classic, and his everyday wheels are a Mini Cooper, also considered a pretty sweet rail.
But O’Connor can’t wait to wrap his forearms around the wheel of a Tesla Model Three, the latest iteration of battery-powered transportation from Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor-entrepreneur.
“It’s titillating. It’s the future,” O’Connor said. “It’s pretty cool.”
Model Three, a sleek sedan that embarks production today at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, is widely hailed as the breakthrough machine that brings electrified automobiles within the budget of ordinary folks, absent the “range anxiety” often associated with cars that stop when the battery is spent.
With a $35,000 base price and 215-mile range, Model three hits the so-called “sweet spot” that brings electrical cars to the general public, said Doron Amiran, electrical vehicle program manager for Santa Rosa-based Center for Climate Protection.
“Every time a fresh and arousing electrical model comes on the market we get closer to the objective,” he said, referring to Gov. Jerry Brown’s target of 1.Five million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025.
It’s an imposing order, considering there are 284,000 ZEVs rolling now. Buyers purchased 13,804 electrical cars in California during the very first quarter of this year, accounting for just Two.7 percent of the fresh vehicles sold in the state during the period, according to the California Fresh Car Dealers Association.
Still, the rate is up from 1.9 percent of fresh car sales in 2016, when a total of 40,347 electrified cars were sold during the year, almost dual the number sold in 2013.
In Sonoma County, there are about Four,500 registered electrical vehicles, accounting for about one percent of all vehicles, according to the climate center’s count.
Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday suggested a striking forecast for the world’s transportation future, reporting that electrical cars will outsell fossil-fuel powered vehicles within two decades as battery prices plunge.
The “seismic shift,” Bloomberg said, will see electrical cars account for a third of the global auto fleet by 2040, displacing about eight million barrels a day of oil production, which is more than Saudi Arabia presently exports.
That shift is picking up speed. On Wednesday, Volvo announced that every fresh model beginning in two thousand nineteen would have an electrified motor as it phases out cars powered solely by gasoline and diesel.
At a formal unveiling of the Model three in March two thousand sixteen before an adoring crowd in Hawthorne, Musk said it was “very significant to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport in this country.”
It’s significant “for the future of the world,” he said, citing an MIT investigate that found 53,000 premature deaths a year in the United States attributed to emissions from road transportation.
The California Air Resources Board reported last year that transportation accounts for thirty six percent — the largest portion — of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, which totaled more than four hundred forty million metric tons in 2014.
Tesla’s Model three “completely converts the entire electrified vehicle landscape,” Amiran said, owing to its price and range, enough to drive from Santa Rosa to San Jose and back.
Some say Chevrolet strike Tesla to the smog-free punch with the Bolt EV, very first sold in California in December 2016. The Bolt, which now sells for about $37,000 and has a 238-mile range, was Motor Trend’s two thousand seventeen car of the year and is the only non-Tesla electrified car presently for sale with a range of more than two hundred miles.